An Apocalyptic Halloween with Landmarks gettin' Lively

View full sizeMathew Brady, Civil WarZombies sharing a laugh after lunch on the holiest of holidays-Halloween.

It was a dark and stormy knight named Nigel who caused the comet to crash into the earth. Nigel was tall, dark and ugly. He loved Halloween because he could dress up as a Knight of the Round Table in full body armor with a helmet and pretend he was a hero.

Nigel had a temper and, in meteorological terms, could be called stormy because of the abuse he received over his English sounding first name. He wasn’t British, but he lived outside Boston and every Fourth of July, as part of their patriotic celebrations, some British hating Bostonians beat him up because of his name.

Every year it took Nigel till Halloween to calm down over this, at which point he put on his armor and clanked along the streets of his small town Blip going door to door trick or treating. But this Halloween all his neighbors turned him away because, at 27, they thought he was too old to be a Halloween-er.

Nigel stormed off to the edge of town where he spotted the house of Professor Balmy, an eccentric fired Harvard physicist. Under a full moon as big as a beach ball, with the autumn air so crisp it snapped at his heels and the wind brisk enough to blow out a star in the sky; he knocked on the professor’s door.

Inside, Professor Balmy was turning on his nuclear powered super collider magnetron, which was so strong it could pull the fillings out of a man’s molars walking down a street in Manchuria, if aimed directly at him, from halfway around the world in Perry County.

Nigel knocked on Balmy’s door and it just popped open. He walked into a dark cavern of a hallway with a glow at the end, which he stumbled toward. The Professor spun around when he heard Nigel yell “Trick or treat.”

Now, the good Professor had no fear of zombies, werewolves, vampires, Robert Pattison, deadly snakes, rabid animals attacking or aunts with large lip moles kissing him as a boy. However, he was terrified of Sir Lancelot, a Knight of King Arthur’s; because his father had used Lancelot as a bogey man to keep him in line, claiming that the good knight would spear Nigel with his lance if he were a bad boy.

So when Prof. Balmy saw Nigel the Knight he instantly aimed his magnetron at him in fear and broke the knob turning up the power. Nigel went flying across the hall to crash into the mighty magnet, setting off a nuclear explosion, when he broke the fuel rods.

As luck would have it, the Comet Katchatorrey was then brushing the Earth’s atmosphere. As this burst of pure magnetic nuclear energy blasted into deep space it tugged at the tail of the comet’s iron filings enough to twist it off course. It warped the magnetic field so badly the massive comet wobbled off its trajectory path and came crashing into Camp Hill. Within hours, all life on Earth was extinguished, but there was one final Halloween.

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